In refusing Edna her heart’s desire thus promptly and tersely I had an object. I assumed she would protest and argue; in the discussion that would follow some light might come to me, utterly befogged as to what course to take about my family affairs. I knew something should be done—something quick and drastic. But what? It was no new experience to me to be faced with complex and well-nigh impossible situations. My business life had been a succession of such experiences. And while I had learned much as to handling them, I had also learned how dangerous it is to rush in recklessly and to begin action before one has discovered what to do—and what not to do. The world is full of Hasty Hals and Hatties who pride themselves on their emergency minds, on knowing just what to do in any situation the instant it arises; and fine spectacles they are, lying buried and broken amid the ruins they have aggravated if not created.
How recover my wife? How rescue my daughter? I could think of no plan—of no beginning toward a plan. And when Edna, by receiving my refusal in cold silence, defeated my hope of a possibly illuminating discussion, I did not know which way to turn.
Why had I refused to help her in the way she suggested? Not on moral grounds, gentle reader. There I should have been as free from scruple as you yourself would have been, as you perhaps have been in your social climbing or maneuvering in your native town, wherever it is. Nor yet through fear of failure. I did not know the social game, but I did know something of human nature. And I had found out that the triumphant class, far from being the gentlest and most civilized, as its dominant position in civilization would indicate, was in fact the most barbarous, was saturated with the raw savage spirit of the right of might. I am speaking of actualities, not of pretenses—of deeds, not of words. To find a class approaching it in frank savagery of will and action you would have to descend through the social strata until you came to the class that wields the blackjack and picks pockets and dynamites safes. The triumphant class became triumphant not by refinement and courtesy and consideration, but by defiance of those fundamentals of civilization—by successful defiance of them. It remained the triumphant class by keeping that primal savagery of nature. As soon as any member of it began to grow tame—gentle, considerate, except where consideration for others would increase his own wealth and power, became really a disciple of the sweet gospel he professed and urged upon others—just so soon did he begin to lose his wealth into the strong unscrupulous hands ever reaching for it—and with waning wealth naturally power and prestige waned.
No, I did not refuse because I thought the triumphant class would contemptuously repel any attempt to carry its social doors by assault. I saw plainly enough that I could compel enough of these society leaders to receive my wife and daughters to insure their position. You have seen swine gathered about a trough, comfortably swilling; you have seen a huge porker come running with angry squeal to join the banquet. You have observed how rudely, how fiercely he is resented and fought off by the others. This, until he by biting and thrusting has made a place for himself; then the fact that he is an intruder and the method of his getting a place are forgotten, and the swilling goes peacefully forward. So it is, gentle reader, though it horrifies your hypocrisy to be told it, so do human beings conduct themselves round a financial or political or social swill trough. I should have had small difficulty in biting and kicking a satisfactory place for Edna and Margot at the social swill trough; I should have had no difficulty at all in keeping it for them. But——
You will be incredulous, gentle reader, devoured of snobbishness and dazzled by what you have heard and read of the glories of fashionable society in the metropolis. You will be incredulous, because you, too, like the overwhelming majority of the comfortable classes in this great democracy—and many of the not so comfortable classes as well—because you, too, are infected of the mania for looking about for some one who refuses to associate with you on the ground that you are “common,” and for straightway making it your heart’s dearest desire to compel that person to associate with you. You will be incredulous when I tell you my sole reason was my hatred and horror of what seemed to me the degrading, vulgar, and rotten longings that filled my wife and that had infected my daughter. That hatred and horror had thrown me into a state of mind I did not dare confess to myself. You are incredulous; but perhaps you will admit I may be truthful when I explain that the reason for my moral and sentimental revolt was perhaps in large part my dense ignorance of the whole society side of life.
No doubt in the Passaic public school of my boyhood there had been as much snobbishness as there is in Fifth Avenue. But I had somehow never happened to notice it. It must have been there; it must be elemental in human nature; how else account for my wife? We hear more about the snobbishness of Fifth Avenue than we do about the snobbishness of the tenements. But that is solely because Fifth Avenue is more conspicuous. Also, Fifth Avenue, supposedly educated, supposedly broadened by knowledge and taste, has no excuse for petty vanities that belong only to the ignorant. And if Fifth Avenue were really educated, really had knowledge and taste, it could not be snobbish. However, my busy life had never been touched by social snobbishness. I preferred to know and to associate with men better educated and richer than I, but for excellent practical reasons—because from such men I could get the knowledge and the wealth I needed. But I would not have wasted a moment of my precious time upon the men most exalted in fashionable life—the ignorant incompetents who had inherited their wealth. They seemed ridiculous and worthless to me, a man of thought and action.
So, the sudden exposure of my wife’s and my little girl’s disease gave me a shock hardly to be measured by the man or woman used all his life to the social craze. It was much as if I had suddenly seen upon their bared bosoms the disgusting ravages of cancer.
As I could not devise any line of action that, however faintly, promised results, I kept away from home. I absorbed myself in some new enterprises that filled my evenings, which I spent at my club with the men I drew into them. At the mention of club, gentle reader, I see your ears pricking. You are wondering what sort of club I belonged to. I shall explain.
It was the Amsterdam Club. You may have seen and gawked at its vast and imposing red sandstone front in middle Fifth Avenue. As you drove by in the “rubber-neck” wagon, the man with the megaphone may have shouted: “The Amsterdam Club, otherwise known as the Palace of Plutocracy. The total wealth of its members is one tenth of the total wealth of the United States. Every great millionaire in New York City belongs to it. The reason you see no one in the magnificent windows is because the plutocrats are afraid of cranks with pistol or bomb.” And you stared and envied and craned your neck backward as the sight-seeing car rolled on. A fairly accurate description of my club. But you will calm as I go on to tell you the inside truth about it. It was built to provide a club for those rich men of New York who had no social position, and so could not be admitted to the fashionable clubs. It was not built by those outcasts for whom it was intended, but by the rich men of the fashionable world. They did not build it out of pity nor yet out of generosity, but for freedom and convenience.